Use of Clickable Videos for Online Marketing

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Not long ago, were websites built with the sole purpose of complementing an ongoing offline business; and today we have millions of websites crowding the internet, relying only on their websites to expand their business.

So, it’s definitely not a surprise to me that online marketing has become an integral and important part of any business today. However, it’s extremely fascinating to know how the new, ‘so called’ innovative avenues for marketing on the internet are created and discovered each passing day. From the host of marketing and advertising techniques available today, one of the recent entrants and, in my opinion, a genuinely effective marketing strategy is ‘Clickable Videos’.

From the day Google started showing signs of evolving into an universal search engine by ranking maps, videos, images etc. along with webpages for search queries, it was very clear where the focus of marketing companies would shift to. Search Engine Marketing companies not only realized the huge business scope in services like Video optimization, Location Map optimization, Image Optimization etc but also realized how much of a handicap it would be if they don’t exploit these avenues, considering the competitive nature of their domain. The result – more services offered and a few actually effective ones like ‘clickable videos’.

Video Promotions and online marketing through videos

Currently, companies and businesses alike use the means of video sharing websites to promote/advertise their website using videos. Popular video sites like Youtube and Metacafe provide a platform for users to share video, but are very particular about the type of links that go out from their sites. All the links going out from these sites are ‘no follow’ (not identified by search engines) and hence do not add any SEO value to the referred website.In such a situation, in the past, the only conceivable way companies could come up with was to use links in the video description, to increase traffic to their desired website. Thanks to the concept of clickable videos, we have more options today.

Although clickable videos provide the same theoretic effect as a link to the website in the video description, the beauty of the clickable videos lies in the way they connect and interact with the viewer. ‘Clickable Videos’ target the core motivation of the viewers, to become an effective marketing strategy. The people who browse for a video on a search engine or on a video site are not looking for the website or the user who has hosted it. They are only interested in viewing the video for which they have searched for. Clickable videos utilize exactly this motivation of the viewer to their benefit.

Explaining further; video searchers can be broadly classified under two categories – the ones who read video descriptions and the ones who don’t (I know that wasn’t rocket science). In most cases, users who read the description read it before watching the video and do not end up clicking on the link in it, because they are yet to watch the video (their main goal). Once they finish watching the video their focus is already shifted (to the video), decreasing the probability of them clicking on the link in the description, which was read few minutes/seconds ago. As far as users who do not read the description are concerned, they would simply watch the video and, shut the browser or move to another video, without paying much heed to the video description.

The beauty of clickable videos lie in the fact that they aim to grab the attention of the users when its most likely to; while watching the video. They bank on the psyche of the viewers to impulsively click on an available link, embedded in the video, when their interest level in the video is maximum. At such a point clicking on a video link which reads ‘Click here for similar videos’ or ‘See the full video here’ becomes an obvious choice for most people. The logic is simple and the result – a highly effective marketing strategy.

Today, the rate at which internet marketing is growing it would not be wrong to say that numerous services, like ‘Clickable Videos’ are being introduced day in and day out by various Internet Marketing Firms, just to add more numbers to their service portfolio. Not all of them help meet the goal of, promoting your website/business. What sets an effective strategy apart from an ineffective or a mediocre one is its potential to complement a user’s goal and objectives.

My advice – If videos form an integral part of your business or your business promotions, clickable videos might just prove to be the answer to your online marketing woes.

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4 responses

Interesting post. Im curious, how do you recommend creating clickable videos? Specifically, is there a provider that you reccommend or are you more referring to customized players that have clickable overlays? In other words, is there a way to make an FLV clickable?

Mark, as of now the common technique used (something which is followed inhouse too) is manual encoding of the interactive element in Flash, CS3 or other related programs.
However, we are currently researching on existing flash plugins as well as the possibility of creating a plugin that would make this task easier. My call is we should have something like this sooner rather than later.

Till then, manual encoding is the best option available even though it is tedious.